Historical Consequence of Youthful Transgressions
by labyrinthine
Summary: The past is bound to repeat itself. Isn't it?


Title: An Historical Consequence of Youthful Transgressions (or: when good challenge titles go bad)  
  
Author: labyrinthine  
  
E-mail: elabyrinthine@yahoo.com  
  
Rating/Classification: PG/vignette, challengefic, Vaughn's POV  
  
Summary: The past is bound to repeat itself. Isn't it?  
  
Disclaimer: None of these characters belong to me. The racially profiling poster is real, however, and how sad is that, really.  
  
A/N: First off, sorry, the title blows chunks, please direct all flames to Hil for creating such a sadistic challenge requirement. I will direct praise to Hil in the meantime, for the general encouragement and kick ass Field Trip that compelled me to write in the first place. Shout outs to the Server 5 gang (the AIM gang?) and anyone still writing challenge fic, in hopes that you will come up with better titles than me. (  
  
I have a story, a bitter anthem, for everyone to hear about…(Something Corporate)  
  
*****  
  
His grandmother would make quilts. She would sit outside on the porch with her needles and patches and sew, creating something out of scraps of stained shirts and forgotten ribbons and blankets that had been overworn from years of use. Things that no longer meant anything to anybody but her. Her needle and thread flying, a sliver blur in the air, taking these remnants of the past and transforming them into a modern day relic.  
  
Something special and desirable composed entirely of seconds, discards, worthless rags. She could always find the beauty in things no one else could see. He was promised one, a quilt for his wedding day, but she passed away years ago and he has never married.  
  
He wishes he could see things the way she did, sorting out imperfections to reveal parts of use in everything imaginable. Taking the forgotten past and giving it a new future. Her quilts were magical, and she was magical, and he has never been able to sew.  
  
*****  
  
He learned to ice skate on a frozen pond, wearing a pair of old skates discovered by accident in the attic one spring cleaning. He loved the pond, loved the free open space, his solitary whoosh through the air. Knowing that during the summer he would swim in this same pond, jump off the splintered dock that jutted forward from land, that this same liquid was trapped just underneath the sheet of ice when it turned cold. When the ice was too thin he was not allowed this freedom to skate, the barrier between summer and winter too fragile and precarious to risk balancing.  
  
One winter, one of the boys who lived a few streets away held a dared this boundary; in his eagerness to use his new birthday skates they never checked the surface and the ice cracked, splintered, opened up and he fell in. Vaughn only remembers hearing about it, hearing this horrible story and then hearing that the boy wound up being okay, just frostbite and a broken leg but that it wasn't okay for him to skate there anymore, you understand, just to be safe. He was devastated, his eleven year old world fractured without warning. He would still pass by the pond during winter, even after the accident, and the ice would call to him, beckoning, and it was difficult to understand why he was not allowed to have something right in front of him.  
  
Years later, he still skates, but in an enclosed arena crowded by hockey players, people who have probably never felt that solitary whoosh that you only get when you are the only person on the ice, when you are breaking air that is moving only because you have made it so. He can't skate by himself anymore, and this is why he plays such an accelerated sport, one with shoulder pads and helmets and sticks and a puck that breaks the air before you ever have a chance.  
  
They sold the house by the pond years ago, and he does not miss it. It taunted him too much, the pond that he could have when it was warm but not now, not anymore, not during the winter. This is still a problem for him – wanting things he can walk right up to and touch they're that close, but are forbidden nonetheless. His eleven year old self never wanted to skate on that pond so much as the day he was told he could never skate there again. He never wanted Sydney so much as the day Weiss admonished him in a cluttered hallway and told him things between them were too personal.  
  
*****  
  
History lessons, the past looping and repeating, mistakes all over again, flashbacks, family trees, ancestors and descendents and the generation in the moment, decades change and Vaughn thinks he could be no man except the man he is now, today, in this exact moment in time.  
  
*****  
  
His apartment is a ménage of memories, secondhands, antiques and expensive furniture modeled after those original furnishings from the past. Everything tells a story, he's just too busy and harried and rushed to pay them any mind, sit down and listen. He knows, intrinsically, that the table in the corner belonged to his grandfather, hand crafted by a friend of the family way back when people actually cared about craftsmanship and doing the job right. Or so his grandfather would say. He loved the table, loved every scratch on its tarnished polish and every dent on the legs and Vaughn stuffed it in a dark corner of his apartment the day he inherited it because it didn't go with his wheat Ethan Allen sofa set. That is what he told Alice, when she asked, because she wouldn't understand. He didn't understand either, but he understood that the table was comprised of more than just wood and nails and polish and until he understood the rest he wanted it somewhere safe, dark and out of the way, so nothing would bump it or add scratches that his grandfather wouldn't remember.  
  
*****  
  
There is a small pile of street signs in a box stuffed away in his mother's attic, signs he and his friends stole in the black of night one summer: "Powers Street", "Memphis = 160 mi", "Dead End." They never stole the 'real' signs like stop or yield, because that would be dangerous, people rely on those signs. People don't rely on dead end signs.  
  
Or so he thought. He would have liked a few markers along the way, guideposts and signals and dead end signs to keep him on course so he wouldn't wander on a path that only lead to remorse and regret. He thinks Weiss was not the kind of boy who stole street signs, but then, Weiss has never questioned the direction he is destined.  
  
Looking about his classically tasteful office, he wonders if he made the right decision, following in his father's footsteps as an operations officer. Sydney did the same thing, essentially, like father like daughter, though her tenure wasn't exactly consensual at the time. They both have baggage, speedbumps that blend into the road and really, it's to be expected but there are times a little yellow paint or a 'bump' sign to warn him would just be so appreciated. Maybe someone stole that too, he theorizes, or more probably, it was never there at all.  
  
There was one time Vaughn looked in the agency archives to see where his father had been stationed in Langley, and discovered that his dad's old office was on the same floor as his own, just down the hall, mere yards away. It was converted five years ago into a makeshift break room, with a cool tiled floor and a little microfridge, coffeepot, stirrers. There is no trace of his father's presence, the hook where he would hang his London Fog overcoat, the little pictures of the family a younger Vaughn would draw with his box of 64 crayons. The break room is a popular place among the agents, but for him, he can't walk in there and not be reminded of his father, why the room became vacant in the first place, and what will happen to his own office, years from now.  
  
*****  
  
Antique stores make him uncomfortable the same way pawn shops make him uncomfortable – a continuous assault of other people's belongings, each with their own history, begging to be described.  
  
It never used to be a problem – Alice felt the same way, back when he was with Alice, that is. Alice's haute fashion sense, shamelessly copied from Paris catwalks and New York seasonal collections, had no room for items of any sort that were even rumored to be out of style. So she stayed away, and he stayed with her, and it never came up until they broke up and he found himself in a dusty ill-lit shop across the street from the Subway he had been looking forward to for lunch right before Christmas last year. And standing in the store holding an antiqued silver frame, surrounded by mementos of the past, he looked through the glass storefront to the bustling street outside, the noise and neon signs and billboards with police funded anti-drug promotional catchphrases like "a veces los daños de la verdad" with graphic pics of drug busts and other modern day maladies displayed for all the Spanish-speaking delinquents the cops were racially profiling to see.  
  
And he began to understand, then, caught between the past that seemed all too innocent and the present that taught so few lessons. The silver frame in his hands became weighted with promise and suddenly it was the most meaningful Christmas gift he had ever intended to give. He knew Sydney would understand, maybe not in the same way he did but she would like it, he believed, in a way no one else in his life would comprehend. She was like that, sometimes, and for all the past between them she remained the reason his future held such excitement.  
  
*****  
  
elabyrinthine@yahoo.com 


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